The Classics File 3: The one Hollywood wants to unmovie

 

 

Title: Gone With The Wind

What Year?: 1939

Classification: Mashup

Rating: Disqualified!

 

With this review, I am at the end of the last lineup I had planned for my No Good Very Bad Movies feature. That brought me to the reason I did this at all, a movie that I have meant to take on for a very long time. It’s a film that has itself gone through a complicated arc, from a blockbuster to unquestioned classic to a problematic “product of its time” to an artifact the mainstream would rather bury in the memory sandbox. I for one have been looking forward to giving it what it deserves. I speak, of course, of Gone With The Wind, and oh dear Logos (which is an actual name of God in the actual Bible), this damn thing is 233 minutes??!!

Our story begins with a text crawl and a lovely montage praising the Antebellum South, minus the slave auctions, whippings and rampant poverty. We then meet seemingly the most hopelessly degenerate specimen of an impressive bunch of hypocrites, inbreds and general-purpose idiots, a tart named Scarlett O’Hara whose ambitions begin and end with marrying a guy named Ashley who has clearly declared his intent to marry another woman. Meanwhile, the inconvenient Civil War starts, occasionally distracting from her antics as she goes through a marriage to a promptly killed soldier and a series of encounters with a smuggler named Rhett Butler. With the help of her servant Mammy, Scarlett keeps control of her family plantation, while Rhett inexplicably works away at her resistance. Soon enough, the pair are married with a kid, but tragedy strikes. It all comes down to a choice between the man she wanted and the man she got- and 83-year-old spoiler, they both throw her overboard!

Gone With The Wind was a 1939 drama/ historical romance from MGM, based on the 1936 novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell. The film was produced by David O. Selznick, known for RKO’s King Kong, who reportedly acquired the rights to the novel a month after its publication. The eventual film was directed by Victor Fleming from a script by Sydney Howard. Clark Gable and Vivian Lee were cast as Rhett and Scarlett, when the former was 40 and the latter was 26. Other cast included Leslie Howard (see Petrified Forest) as Ashley, Olivia De Havilland as Melanie, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. A score was composed by Max Steiner, returning from Kong. The film was an immediate success, earning a box office estimated at over $390 million against a $3.85M budget. McDaniel won an Oscar for Supporting Actress, the first Academy Award given to an African-American. Gable continued to act until his death in 1960, prior to the release of his final film The Misfits. Leigh became otherwise best known for stage and screen appearances with her spouse Laurence Olivier. Mitchell died in a traffic fatality in 1949, without publishing another major work of fiction. She became posthumously known as a collector and proponent of erotica. The film remains available on digital platforms including HBO Max.

For my experiences, what I feel a need to comment on is the Disqualified category, which I created for this feature specifically for films I would not or could not watch in full. It might sound like this means a film so bad I literally quit, but that’s really not how these things work. For me, actually bailing on a movie is usually an early and potentially respectful decision (see The Plague Dogs). The ones to figure in this feature have been the ones I knew I was not going to get through, and even then, I have usually gotten through far more than I expected. With this movie in particular, there was simply no way I was even going to try to watch the whole thing in one go. I settled for watching it in two parts on consecutive days, with the intention of liberal fast-forwards. In the end, I probably only shaved a few minutes off its mindboggling running time. My final verdict is that it only belongs here because it’s the only feature where I have given myself the right parameters to comment.

Moving forward, I went into this with some fairly distinct memories of watching it on VHS, and many more of seeing it referenced and parodied. What has kept me vaguely and morbidly fascinated is that its reputation is completely belied by any recounting in cold blood. If the “point” of this story was to show that Rhett and Scarlett were not just evil racists but immoral, contemptible, irredeemable, completely horrible yet utterly banal human beings, there isn’t a single story point that would change. What is even more baffling is that for all the glowing revisionism of the text crawls, the Confederacy is put in an even less favorable light. It’s genuinely moving to see the devastation of war, which makes the later first act far more engaging than anything before or sense. But to the truly neutral eye, it remains quite clear from the film’s own accounts that virtually all responsibility lies on the slave owners, specifically portrayed to be as stupid and absent-mindedly cruel as the Abolitionists could have imagined. One more rant this sets off, it is also clear on impartial analysis that the plight of the poor white conscripts who made up the bulk of the Confederate Army was even more immaterial to the Lost Cause mythology than that of the slaves.

With that out of the way, I have more than enough to proceed just on how intolerable I find Scarlett/ Leigh in particular. This is a chicken/ egg paradox that vexes me enough that I really couldn’t claim to give this film a proper rating if I had intended to. The character as written feels permanently arrested as a spoiled 15-year-old, repeatedly proven unwilling and unable to learn from any of her adversities. As the hours pass, the clearly capable Leigh somehow transforms this creature into something even more transcendently uncharismatic and unlikeable than she was before. To give just one example, when she is weeping at becoming a widow, Leigh’s delivery seems to emphasize that she really is in all likelihood more upset by “wearing black” than anything else. Where Gable gives enough depth to wish his character a better fate and a better cause, his counterpart seems to dig for ways to make the viewer want her to die. And I know it’s a subjective judgment, but I find Leigh to be one of the most unaccountably irritating screen presences I have encountered, to the point that I’m sure I used at least half my allotted skip time when I got tired of her voice. To give some frame of reference, I find her worse than the rich girls we were supposed to hate in Heathers (which I regularly considered for this feature). Indeed, the one character/ actor combination I can think of that I could compare is Ken Marshall in Krull, and I actually like that one.

That leaves me with the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that’s quite early. Right after Scarlett receives news of secession, we find Rhett and Ashley among a gathering of Southern gentlemen enthusiastically declaring their prowess. When Ashley proves less than enthusiastic, the rest appeal to Rhett. He matter-of-factly points out that the Union has more weapons, factories and ships than the Confederacy ever will. He finishes by commenting, “All we’ve got is cotton, slaves… and arrogance.” Of course, the gentlemen are outraged, without offering any comment to foreshadow that these were indeed the foremost among many reasons the South foreseeably would not and could not win the war. As commendable as it would seem, this is the part that leaves me actually angry. The Lost Cause fairy tale was not just biased historiography but toxic nonsense that did real and ongoing harm, and the people who willingly cast Noble Johnson in King Kong should have known that better than anyone. I have said as long as I have been writing reviews that there is such a thing as immorally bad. In those terms, the only thing worse than propaganda for an evil cause is propaganda from those who don’t even believe in it.

In closing, I find I come back to Ingagi, an actually censored film that by any standard deserved it. I have deemed it unnecessary to comment that this film has grown controversial enough to draw arguments over censorship. In reality, the strongest efforts of the film’s detractors aren’t remotely comparable to the general unmovie-ing of Ingagi, yet I find a common denominator in the implicit embarrassment of the “mainstream” media, first and foremost at the simple fact that they were successful. To me, taking on this film wasn’t about its politics or its history. It’s about calling the powers that have always been to account for every bloated blockbuster that has been promoted, praised and then conveniently forgotten by seemingly everyone but me. You can forget your mistakes, or pretend you have, but I won’t. With that, I can say that this feature has brought me closure. Who’s next?